Leslie

It is sometimes strange the places that memory will take you unexpectedly. I woke up this morning thinking about someone I have haven't seen or heard from in well over 20 years.

Back then, I was working (crunching numbers in the administrative bowels of a famous cosmetics company; its initials...MF...having a distinct double meaning to anyone who worked there for any length of time) and living (in an apartment building that had been converted from an old mansion...it had just enough character left to be charming rather than just ramshackle) in Hollywood. Leslie lived a couple of blocks away (in an apartment building that was neither charming nor ramshackle but rather, like most of them, just blandly functional.)

Leslie was a lithe brunette with high cheekbones and sad, knowing green-gray eyes. She was always coy about revealing her age but I always presumed she was a year or two older than I. Leslie was a student by day...working to become a nurse though, truth to be told, her efforts on this front seemed rather half-hearted...and a prostitute by night (just doing it...she told herself and anyone who cared to listen...long enough to pay for her schooling.)

I met Leslie at a bus stop on Sunset Boulevard. I'd come from visiting a friend and had stopped at a supermarket to pick up a few things. Not wanting to walk home (less than a mile or so away...my apartment building was a couple of blocks north of Hollywood Boulevard) I had decided to take the bus. Leslie had been waiting there for a while. She asked me for the time and we chatted about nothing much at all until her "date"...a balding man with furtive eyes driving a late model Mercedes...pulled into the parking lot of the supermarket behind us. Leslie excused herself and went to the driver's side of the Mercedes and leaned in. After talking for a couple of moments she walked around the front of the car and got into the front passenger seat. As they drove away, she gave me a look that managed to convey both haughtiness and embarrassment in the same instant.

I ran into her again a couple of Sundays after that. Hollywood was a quiet place on Sunday mornings...the night people would disappear to wherever they spent their days and the day people, who inhabited the streets on working weekdays, were safe at home in their suburban bedroom communities...and I would often get up walk a couple blocks to a sprawling 24-hour newsstand to buy Sunday papers, magazines, and comic books and then go have muffins and tea in a small coffeeshop nestled just off the Boulevard (Hollywood Blvd. in this case.) That morning, Leslie was there drinking coffee and letting a cigarette burn itself out in the ashtray on the table (Leslie was not a serious smoker...she took a couple of puffs and then let them burn out; I often wondered why she bothered buying cigarettes.) We chatted about nothing...after a wary silence...for the better part of an hour.

We walked and talked for a while, ending up at my apartment house where we went our separate ways. We became friends after a fashion...meeting in the coffeehouse, window shopping along the Boulevard in the quiet of weekend mornings...and eventually she even left me come to her apartment (a very rare happenstance she assured me.) She admitted that she liked my company because I wasn't trying to hit on her...to get into her pants, as she put it. We would sometimes talk at night...after I got off work and before she went out...and she told me a lot (but certainly not all) about her life in Iowa...her relocation to L.A....her dreams of being a nurse...her stumbling into prostitution and finding the money quick and, relatively, easy. I never believed it was as easy for her as she put on but I didn't call her on that.

It got to the point where, for reasons I never completely understood, she entrusted me with her key...to feed her cat and her fish when she went on extended out of town "dates" to Vegas or Palm Springs or wherever...and sometimes I would linger in her apartment watching TV (hers was much nicer than mine :-) and keeping the cat company. Sometimes Leslie would come home "early" and be surprised...but not really displeased...that I was there. She wouldn't talk much and she would go directly to the bathroom and stand under the shower for a long time. She would wrap up in frumpy pajamas and an old bathrobe and pretend to watch TV with me until she fell asleep. I'd carry her to bed and let myself out. It was an odd friendship to say the least (no odder than on the night she called me to bail her out of jail at 2:30 AM...I was sure that the bail bondsman and the cop at the front desk both thought I was her pimp but I was too tired at the time to care about that.)

Eventually, Leslie met a man some twenty years or so her senior (and married, of course) who wanted to take her away from her life as a prostitute. Eventually, though she seemed not to care much for the man, she agreed to let him "save" her. He put her up in an apartment in Hawaii (apparently he was some kind of exporter and spent a lot of time traveling between California, Hawaii, and Japan) and she disappeared from my life (one of the caveats her "sponsor" demanded was that Leslie cut off all ties from her old life.)

I always hoped that she found some measure of "happily ever after" wherever she ended up.

Strange that she would come into my mind so strongly this morning after all these years. I'm not going to overthink it...there's no point in that, sometimes the mind does what it does and all we can do is go with it.